Category: Drink

The story goes that everyone in Brazil drinks caipirinhas when it’s oppressively hot. And because Brazil is on the equator, it’s oppressively hot pretty much all the time.

The ingredients for a caipirinha couldn’t be simpler: a lime, sugar, and a couple ounces of a Brazilian alcohol called cachaça, a sort of cousin to white rum. Most rum is made from fermenting molasses, a byproduct of sugar production. Cachaça is made by fermenting unprocessed sugarcane juice. It tastes like a slightly sour, faintly musky rum. That sourness plays extremely well off crushed limes.

Because the caipirinha — which is apparently pronounced “kai·pr·ee·nyuh“ — is so entrenched in Brazilian culture, it has inspired strongly held beliefs and heated disagreements. One of the most strongly argued caipirinha disputes is whether it needs to be made with granulated sugar, as caipirinha purists insist, or if it can be made with sugar syrup, like 95 percent of the sweetened cocktails in the world.

Because of my deep commitment to world peace, I decided to try the two versions side by side.

Here is the classic recipe for a caipirinha:

• 1 lime, sliced into wedges
• 2 teaspoons table sugar
• 2 ounces cachaça – which is apparently pronounced “kuh-shah-sah,” which sounds like an obscure type of martial arts weapon. “This is no ordinary murder, Higgins; this man was killed by a cachaça.”

Muddle the lime wedges and sugar in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. There will be a lot of juice, so don’t smash the limes like you might normally with a muddler. Grind it down hard, for longer than you might normally, but make sure you don’t splash.

Add cachaça and ice, then stir thoroughly with a bar spoon and pour into a rocks glass. Some bartenders suggest garnishing it with a lime wheel, but there is so much lime in this drink already, that seems a bit like overkill.

The theory is that the sugar acts like an abrasive and helps strip citrus oil out of the lime peel. That seems unlikely; logic would suggest that the crushed lime produces so much acidic juice that the sugar is dissolved almost instantly and doesn’t have time to abrade anything. But let’s withhold judgment; sometimes Reality ignores Logic mercilessly.

OK, let’s set this aside and make a second caipirinha, with sugar syrup. Do everything the same, but add two teaspoons of simple syrup at the same time as the cachaça.

Crush, crush, crush, pour, pour, clink, clink, clink. Stir, stir. Pour/clink/gurgle. Let’s take a look at the two caipirinhas side by side.

They both look and smell delicious.

Taking a sip of the caipirinha made with syrup: **Raised eyebrows** This is a very solid cocktail. It’s a little sour and musky from the cachaça, just sweet enough, and a love letter to lime.

That’s going to be tough to beat. Let’s try the classic caipirinha: **Pupils dilate, ceiling opens up, the sound of angels singing fills the kitchen**

I realize that I’m still standing in my kitchen, but for just an instant I was sitting on a patio surrounded by tropical flowers while samba music played in the background.

The caipirinha made with sugar is better by several orders of magnitude. This is the real love letter to lime, written with a fountain pen, using sophisticated metaphors and a complex rhyme scheme. In comparison, the other one was a late-night text, asking, “U up?”

(I drank both versions, by the way; I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.)

I think I’ll open a summer-only pop-up bar called Cai-Piranha.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

A shockingly large percentage of 20-year-olds are convinced that they make an extremely good piña colada. They aren’t precisely wrong; a 20-year-old’s piña colada tastes really good — to a 20-year old. Fill a blender with ice, pour it about a third of the way up with pineapple juice, half a can or so of pre-sweetened cream of coconut — the one with the parrot on it — and an unconscionable amount of rum.

Grind, whiz, slurp, and you’ve got something that will be a big hit with other 20-year-olds. It’s perfect for a dorm room, or a secret party in your buddy’s parent’s garage.

Many of us go through our adult life still convinced that we make a really good piña colada, until one day, after years of not having one, we confidently blend up a batch and are confronted with the fact that like many decisions we made in our youth this one has not aged well.

Most blender piña coladas are too sweet, too slushy, and taste a little like chemicals. So what if we gave the blender a break and made one much less sweet, and not so redolent of polysorbate 60?

A Grown-Up Piña Colada

• 2 ounces dark rum – I like Gosling’s or Pusser’s
• 3 ounces pineapple juice
• 3 ounces coconut milk
• ½ ounce honey syrup (see below)

Honey and pineapple have a natural affinity for each other. The muskiness of the honey tempers the fruitiness of pineapple juice. Unfortunately, if you drizzle honey onto the ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, it will seize up and won’t mix with other ingredients very well. Most bartenders get around this by using honey syrup. It’s like simple syrup, but made with honey, instead of sugar. The water is like a cocktail for the honey, loosening it up and making it more likely to mingle with its new friends.

Combine an equal amount of honey and water in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir the mixture to make sure the honey is completely diluted in the water, then take it off the heat to cool. Honey is antimicrobial, so this syrup should last indefinitely in your refrigerator.

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice (make sure that it is large enough to hold eight and a half ounces of cocktail). Add all the ingredients, and shake thoroughly. This is one of those times when it’s OK to shake until you hear the ice breaking inside the shaker.

Pour the chilled drink into a Collins glass or a mason jar, then top it off with more ice, and stir it. Theoretically, you could use a mason jar to shake it, then just remove the lid and add a straw. I’m old enough that it seems like it might be fun to hand out unmixed piña colada at a party and have everyone shake theirs at the same time, possibly while listening to KC and the Sunshine Band’s unlamented classic “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.” At the very least it would humiliate and drive away any children present, giving the grownups a little breathing room.

We’ve already established that honey and pineapple juice complement each other. Coconut and pineapple are both from the same neighborhood; they go way back. With actual coconut milk, the finished drink is silky and rich, rather than overly sweet. It goes without saying that rum is everyone’s friend.

Twenty-year-old you would not be impressed. Which is sort of the point.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

The first few sips of a blender drink are virtually perfect. The problem is that a few minutes later you’ve drunk all the flavor and you’re left with a weak, sad pile of slush.

Which is why, when I want a really cold drink, I rely on crushed ice. It chills the cocktail effectively, but stays apart from it, like a, I don’t know, a lifeguard or something. This metaphor has gotten away from me.

Blueberry Daiquiri

Blueberries in Syrup

• Frozen wild blueberries – regular blueberries are in season and would definitely work for this recipe, but wild ones generally have more flavor and are small enough to get through a large straw; regardless, they should be frozen, to help syrup-ify them
• An equal amount of sugar, by weight
• A pinch of salt

The Daiquiri Itself

• 2 ounces blueberries in syrup
• 2 ounces golden rum – white rum would be a little too subtle for this application; a dark or black rum would overpower the other ingredients; something golden like Faraday is a good daiquiri rum
• 2 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
• A splash – perhaps an ounce – of club soda
• A large amount of crushed ice – this could be from the door in your refrigerator, or run through an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice crusher; I prefer to wrap regular ice cubes in a bar towel and smash it up with the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which gives me a nice mixture of ice, from large half-cubes down to fine snow

Cook the blueberries, sugar and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally. At first it will be a gloppy, slightly purple pile of sugar. Suddenly, a few minutes into the cooking process, the berries will realize the futility of their existential stubbornness and collapse into a thin jam. Keep cooking and stirring, until the liquid starts to boil. Make sure that all the sugar sticking to the sides of the pan has dissolved into the hot blueberry sauce.

Remove from heat, and set aside to cool.

Fill a mixing glass with a couple handfuls of crushed ice, then add the other ingredients. Stir gently, but thoroughly, into a more or less homogeneous solution.

Transfer into a tall glass, and top with a splash of club soda and a few syrupy blueberries.

Take your drink to your deck, or front porch, or fire escape, and drink it with an oversized boba straw while listening to “The Girl from Ipanema.” It could be the original Brazilian version, or the hep-cat, Sammy Davis big band version, or even Amy Winehouse’s take on it, but the important thing is that you can lean back and draw large amounts of blueberries, rum and lemon into yourself, until it’s difficult to know where you end and the samba music starts. In fact, you could make up an entire playlist of nothing but covers of “The Girl from Ipanema” and spend an hour or two comparing them.

Normally, one of the pillars of a good daiquiri is fresh lime juice, but blueberries and lemon get along so splendidly, whether in a cheesecake or a cocktail, that the lemon is a good substitution in this particular drink. It provides the same amount of acidity and zing, but dances — we might even say it sambas — with the blueberries. The syrupy blueberries bring sweetness and depth to the daiquiri and might even make it a little too sweet if not for the club soda, which brings additional zing to the proceedings while diluting the syrup. The crushed ice brings the temperature down enough to make drinking this cocktail intensely, almost painfully, refreshing.

Without bringing your blender into it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

I don’t have to tell you that this Saturday, June 22, is National Kissing Day. You’ve been stocking up on breath mints and lip balm for weeks.

There are quite a few kissing-themed cocktails. One popular one is called the Kiss Me. It’s one of those drinks that’s fairly simple in execution but calls for ingredients most of us are unlikely to have on hand. It will almost certainly require a trip to the liquor store. Because of this, you might want to save this recipe for a special occasion, like National Kissing Day.

Surprisingly, the most difficult ingredient to track down for this drink is strawberry schnapps. In the end, it required a work-around to replicate, which, in turn, required changing up the recipe’s traditional ratios. It’s easy enough to make strawberry syrup and mix it with vodka and end up with something very like schnapps.

In spite of using (almost) the same ingredients, this cocktail is different enough from a classic Kiss Me that it deserves a name of its own.

Stolen Kiss

• 1 part rye whiskey
• 1 part “strawberry schnapps” – see below
• 1 part passionfruit cocktail — I like Goya’s; it’s delicious and easily available in the apple juice aisle at your favorite supermarket
• 3 parts prosecco

Making Strawberry “Schnapps”

Combine equal amounts of frozen strawberries and granulated sugar, by weight, in a small saucepan.

Cook over medium heat, until the strawberries give up all their juice — encourage this with a potato masher — and the mixture comes to a boil.

Remove from heat, add the juice of half a lemon, and allow to cool.

Strain using a fine-mesh strainer. Eat the solids that are left behind on an English muffin or a crumpet; you won’t be sorry.

Bottle and save in the refrigerator for several weeks, although you’ll be lucky if it lasts through the weekend.

To make a decent substitute for strawberry schnapps, combine one part strawberry syrup with two parts medium-shelf vodka. I like Tito’s for this.

The Actual Cocktail

Combine the rye, “schnapps” and passionfruit with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake enthusiastically.

Measure out and gently pour the prosecco into the cocktail shaker and stir gently. If you have an actual cocktail spoon, one with a long twisty handle, it will do a good job at mixing the drink thoroughly without de-fizzing the prosecco. If you don’t have one, a wooden spoon or even a fork will work well enough; just remember that you are mixing this gently, as if it might explode.

Strain the cocktail — again, gently — into a Champagne flute.

Drink — hopefully with company — to a kissing-themed song. There are any number of kissing songs, but my personal recommendation would be for Louis Armstrong’s version of “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” Given agreeable company, it might make your heart feel as fizzy as the cocktail.

There’s a lot going on with this cocktail. The fact that it’s in a Champagne flute means that the fruity notes won’t hit your nose right away. Something like 70 percent of what we “taste” is actually dependent on what we smell. Because of the shape of the flute, you’ll catch this drink’s fruitiness on the back end, but with your first sip the rye will take a guitar solo. It’s on the second, third, or 17th sip that everything will fall into place. Appropriately enough, it tastes like a flirtation.

Featured Photo: Stolen Kiss. Photo by John Fladd.

There are words floating around in the air that we’ve heard, that we’d love to use in conversation, but whose meaning we don’t know. We feel like we should know. We’ve read them in books or heard fancy people use them. We’re pretty sure that everyone else in the world knows them, but we don’t want to admit our ignorance.

My favorite one of these words is “insouciant.”

Another of them is “frangipane.” Don’t let this intimidate you. It’s just the term for an almond cream that is used in pastry sometimes.

Frangipane-Raspberry Pie

• 1 pre-baked pie shell – you can buy one of these premade and frozen at the supermarket or you can make your own or you can buy premade pie dough and bake it according to the instructions on the box; blind baking (making a pie crust without any filling in it) is a whole angsty topic that requires a much longer discussion than we have time for today; seriously, the premade dough makes a very credible pie crust, don’t feel guilty about using it
• 1 1/3 stick (150 g) butter
• ¾ cup (150 g) granulated sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1½ cup (150 g) almond flour – I like Bob’s Red Mill
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• ½ cup (170 g) seedless raspberry jam – I don’t like raspberry seeds, but if you’re some sort of thrill-seeker, feel free to use the full-octane stuff

Preheat your oven to 325°F.

If you’ve baked a pie shell yourself, let it cool completely.

Using a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar until they are fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes. Most Kitchen Smart People will tell you to use softened butter, but a stand mixer will beat cold butter into submission and be happy about it. If you don’t have a stand mixer, you should probably listen to the experts.

Add the egg. Because the yolk contains a lot of fat, it will mix in with the butter-fluff without complaining, and bring protein with it to give structure to frangipane while it bakes. Follow this with the almond flour and extract.

Beat the mixture until it is fluffy again.

Meanwhile, glop spoon the raspberry jam into your pie shell and spread it around so that it covers the entire bottom.

Transfer the almond mixture to the pie shell, on top of the jam. Spread it evenly with an offset spatula if you have one. If you don’t, try the back of a large spoon. You’ll say to yourself, “What’s the big deal? I beat this until it was fluffy. Twice! I can spread it around with a butter knife!” No, you can’t. While fluffy and delicious, frangipane is stubborn; it needs to be persuaded to spread out on top of the jam instead of mixing into it. Use the spatula to spread the filling toward you until it reaches the edge of the pie pan, then rotate the pan and repeat, until you’ve covered the whole pie.

Wish your pie well, then bake it for 45 to 50 minutes. Check on it during the last 10 minutes or so of baking. If it’s starting to look a little dark, cover it with a sheet of aluminum foil.

Remove from the oven and let it cool completely before serving. You might want to garnish it with whipped cream and fresh raspberries.

This is a delicious pie. It tastes primarily of almonds at first — rich, dense, and a little pecan-pie-like, but the crispy part where the frangipane has bonded with the side crust is something special. The sharpness of the raspberries cuts through the richness of the pie but adds to its sweetness.

There are two advantages to this pie. One, of course, is the pie itself. It’s a really good pie. The other is social. When you share this — and you really will want to show it off — and a friend asks what it is, you can flip your hair insouciantly, and say, “Oh, this? It’s just some frangipane. How do you feel about frangipane?” HA! Take that, Gertrude!

Featured Photo: Frangipane. Photo by John Fladd.

The stem of a glass — a wine glass, a Champagne flute or a martini glass — is there to help you keep your drink at the proper temperature. Glass is an excellent thermal insulator, and if you hold your glass by the stem very little of the heat from your hands will travel up to the drink, so it will stay cool longer.

Which is very useful for drinks that you want to drink very, very cold, like a sidecar.

Rhubarb Sidecar

Rhubarb Syrup

Rhubarb, chopped and frozen

An equal amount of granulated sugar, by weight

The juice of half a lemon

Sidecar

2 ounces cognac

1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

¾ ounce rhubarb syrup

Cook frozen chopped rhubarb and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally. By freezing the rhubarb, you have caused jagged crystals of ice to form and puncture most of the cell walls in the rhubarb. The sugar is emotionally needy and draws the juice from the rhubarb and bonds with it. It is unclear how the rhubarb feels about this, but it doesn’t really have any choice in the matter, because under heat the sugar is drawn into solution in its juice with a happy sigh. If you want to encourage this chemical matchmaking, you can use a potato masher to hurry the process along.

Bring the mixture to a boil, and wait a few seconds longer to make sure all the sugar has completely dissolved. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice to the mixture, then strain it with a fine-mesh strainer. Leave it to cool. (Don’t throw away the rhubarb solids; they are delicious.)

Wrap a double-handful of ice in a tea towel and beat it vigorously with something heavy (I use the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, but a meat tenderizer or the bottom of a small pot will work well, too). When you have crushed your ice, fill a martini glass with it and set it aside for five minutes or so to chill. This will give you time to squeeze the lemon juice for the cocktail — unless you’ve got a particularly selfless one that gives generously of itself, this will probably take a whole lemon’s worth.

Combine the cognac, lemon juice and your now-cool rhubarb syrup (cool in a temperature sense; the mere fact that you are making this cocktail makes you cool in a social sense) over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake extra-thoroughly; you want this cocktail to be colder than a penguin pawnbroker’s heart.

Dump the ice out of the martini glass; you’ve left it in until the last possible instant, to make sure the glass is as cold as possible. Strain the cocktail into it, with a hum of satisfaction at its color, a pinkish shade of apricot, like a bolt of silk in a hidden corner of a Turkish bazar. Find someplace quiet and comfortable — a screened-in porch, perhaps — and sip the drink while thinking about that time at that party when you were actually witty and attractive.

A sidecar is a classic cocktail in the same family as margaritas, whiskey sours and gimlets: a healthy belt of liquor, some sort of citrus juice and something sweet. In this case the brandy works really well with the fruitiness of the homemade rhubarb syrup. Rhubarb’s tartness plays well off the lemon juice. When a sidecar is skull-shrinkingly cold, the cognac takes a leading role in the taste, as it slowly warms up — because you’ve remembered to hold your glass by the stem — and the more delicate fruity flavors become a little more pronounced.

A sidecar is much like many of us, who start out cold and sharp but mellow out a little with age.

Featured Photo: Rhubarb Sidecar. Photo by John Fladd.